How to Hack Content Marketing in Your Company: 16 Non-Obvious Tactics

Why content marketing matters

This article collects methods and techniques that will help you make your content marketing more effective: an analysis of successful cases, life hacks and a selection of useful materials. The information applies to EdTech as well as to any other field.

In EdTech, content marketing is used to attract the attention of potential customers and help them understand how your product or service can be useful. It helps raise loyalty and awareness and generate leads.

In the current situation many companies, EdTech included, have to use fewer promotion channels, and content marketing helps solve that problem. High search rankings, PR in the media, collaborations with other companies and much more all come from strong content.

For example, the blocking of the Google ad account can be compensated by high search positions that quality content brings. Netology develops its Media, and its expert materials often make the top 10 for topical queries. Its traffic from search is now 40–45% of the total.

Instead of Google, Yandex Direct has come into wider use, as Foxford does. They use promo pages: long reads that pay back well and bring hot leads.

All these examples say one thing: content marketing is invaluable.

Why content matters

Content is the god of marketing. You write words that sell your product or service and convince potential customers to act. In many ways it is like hiring one salesperson to reach all your customers, which increases sales.

Content is art. Research has shown that those who use content marketing have a conversion rate six times higher than those who do not.

Content is a long-term, risk-free asset. If you write well, you do not have to spend money on paid advertising that may not pay back. With such an asset you cement the growth of sales and reach step by step, and it works forever.

And besides buying advertising, content is useful at every stage of the funnel:

60% of the marketers surveyed by HubSpot Research considered content marketing a “very important” or “extremely important” part of marketing:

1Spend at least twice as much time on the material

How long does it take to write a good article? The length of a piece is a question that is always debated in the team.

If you make a piece a little longer than usual, how often do you hear the CMO (or your inner voice) object?

The heated arguments can be ended by showing research that every year marketers spend more and more time creating materials:

Moreover, research shows that the more words, the higher the search engine ranking and the more readers:

If you see the read-through rate of your articles falling, making the texts shorter is almost always wrong. The right thing is to look at WHAT is written. Most likely, what is written does not meet the need of your audience (how to meet the need is covered in the point “Go down into the subway”).

The more you write of what readers really need, the more likely they are not only to read to the end, but also to buy from you and recommend you to friends.

This means it is worth spending a few extra hours to turn a 1,000-word post into a 2,000-word post.

And one more thing: after COVID-19 consumers have become more demanding about content quality. All this means you must dig deeper into writing genuinely useful material.

2Provoke and make some hype

Here is what PlayKey marketer Ruslan Sharapov recommends:

Go against the majority opinion, deliberately stirring things up. Making a selection of top cosplayers? Deliberately put a body-positive lady on the cover: you will get not only a high CTR but also a ton of comments saying the author has lost their mind. And then the paladins will come, who will argue in the comments for months, each time pushing your publication higher and higher in the feed.

— Ruslan Sharapov, PlayKey

Provocation is what unites Lebedev, Lady Gaga and Buzova.

And look at these headlines created by the Glavpiar agency to raise awareness of various companies:

• Strippers followed Putin and cut their own salaries
• The head of Burger King challenged the head of McDonald’s to a Pokémon GO duel
• A Russian company offers $100,000 for Zhdun to give it to Russian Post
• Burger King decided to support Buzova with a “Big Horseradish”
• Raccoons staged a brawl in the Moscow office of Yota-system

Dmitry Kolodin, SMM manager at Aviasales, uses the same method.

The main thing is that the provocation and hype hit the useful properties of the product.

Also, do not be shy about unconventional promotion channels. Look at Skillbox’s experience: they used Avito for promotion, where CPM is low (about 20 roubles), targeting options are broad and competition is lower.

3Turn to trends

As 2023 ends, let us recall several trends we relied on. Some of them can probably still be used in the new year.

We have already said that the market is oversaturated with information, so consumers have become more demanding about the quality and usefulness of content. To hold their attention, keep your finger on the pulse and create content that matches or touches on trends.

• Short videos. Yes, clip thinking. Everyone likes to get quality information quickly, which is why Shorts and Reels are so popular. Either way, short videos can be used to promote services and to show the personality of a brand, like Skyeng. Has anyone not yet seen their videos where an American reacts, tries, tells and listens?
• Artificial intelligence. The most popular trend, which has taken over every sphere of life. Use neural networks in your work and talk about it actively. Look at how neural networks created new professions in EdTech.
• Stronger presence on the internet. Use every available platform: blogs, websites, social networks. Create a single brand voice by which people will recognise you.

4Choose the headline right

As of May 2020, one Timepad blog post gets 1,500 views. The number of people who read an email with the same content is 10 times higher. The number who read an email with the same content but with the right headline is 30 times higher.

Just a few words, but the user decides by them whether to open the article. It is possible and necessary to spend an hour or two on it.

4 rules of a converting headline

1. Be unique to your brand voice and match your target audience.
2. Have numbers, a verb, triggers (for example, “How I brought 95,657 readers to my blog”).
3. Convey a sense of urgency.
4. Match the content (nobody likes being lured by a beautiful headline, finding nothing there and feeling cheated).

It took Ogilvy a long time to find convincing enough details to sell Rolls-Royce. So here is an example of a good Ogilvy headline:

At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.

As a fifth, though weaker, rule: address the reader as “you”, not “we”. Using “you” means you talk directly to the customer.

By the way, the name of your blog or of the place where you publish content is the same kind of headline. See how conversion from the home page to the blog changes if it is not “Blog” but “Knowledge” or “Education Center”.

So you have built converting headlines. But how do you measure their effectiveness? Use good old A/B tests. See how The New York Times does it.

In a test, several headline variants are created and randomly distributed between different groups of users. Then the metrics (CTR, conversion and so on) are analysed and the one that performed best is chosen.

Many ad platforms now offer such a tool. For example, if you use Yandex Direct, it will run the A/B test on its own, and you only have to assess the results.

And a bonus: a cheat sheet with 71 headlines. Use it to realise more of your ideas.

5Use the “slippery slide” method

You chose a good headline, good. It caught attention and was clicked. But to hold the attention you won, you need a subheading. With details, expertise, anything.

For the attention to stay with the reader further, you need an interesting first paragraph. Then an interesting second one. And so on.

An excellent example of such a piece is the one about “Dushu”, niche perfume samples by subscription. The article collected not only 25 thousand views but, as the author said, 100 orders!

6Link the present to the past

Do your homework. Take the time to insert a link to new content into old materials, and the other way round.

According to Moz, 99.2% of the top 50 results in Google have at least one link to the site from some external site.

Also, once a week, month or quarter it is not a bad idea to publish, in your social networks or newsletters, narratives with selections of the most popular materials. This gives past publications a second life and cuts the time spent writing new posts.

7Forget SEO, find usefulness

It is good if you use the basics of SEO and can pick headlines for search queries. But the main thing is to write the article for a person, not for a robot.

Life hack: choose a niche, find a need and solve it with content, ignoring the site and SEO. For example, a small advertising site of the town of Berezniki in Perm Krai simply posted the bus timetable to grow its traffic:

A 1995 design and no classic SEO. But the people of Berezniki really use it. That is because since 2015 usefulness to the user has become more important than semantics.

8Prepare the text for scanning

How were we taught to write a term paper? Each paragraph had to be at least three sentences long, double-spaced, blah blah blah. The university has its own rules, but outside it you should not do that: writing has changed.

It matters that your content can be scanned. Like it or not, 79% of your audience will not read your content but only skim it.

And now stop! What did you visually remember:

• “Scanning” (that is a subheading);
• there seemed to be 2 paragraphs (that is layout);
• 79% (that is highlighting);
• a picture (that is graphics).

That is what I mean.

Data show higher engagement with visual content than with plain text:

9Use tools

In the English-speaking world they say: don’t be a fool, use a tool. It is good that in 2023 there are very many copywriting tools. Typograf and Glvrd alone are worth a lot.

Designers will find a site with icons and a photo stock useful. Copywriters will be helped by a service for generating content ideas.

And 2023 is the year of neural networks. They can become a supplementary and important aspect of your content:

• Copy.ai writes an SEO article, thinks through the brand voice and prepares content for social networks
• Logoai.com creates a logo
• Durable.co builds a website

And useful AIs keep arriving. Is it not a fairy tale?

10Package the link to your material

How you present a material is as important as the material itself.

When you publish an article on Facebook*, add one or two short sentences that reflect the essence of the post and explain how others will read it.

Also, Facebook* posts with photos get more links, shares and comments. That is a fact:

If you promote your article with such force, you will certainly make the right impact.

11Start with the strongest

Burst into the article with the strongest first screen! The stronger the arguments used at the beginning, the more receptive the audience becomes.

Tell your readers why they should keep reading. The classic methods are “Problem, Agitation, Solution” (PAS) and AIDA. An attempt to do this is made at the beginning of this very article.

12Go down into the subway

It is important to understand that content can be called successful when it helps your customer succeed. To understand this you need to “go down into the subway”.

If you think you are really a good singer, go to the subway underpass and prove it. If you think you really solve the reader’s problem, do yourself what you recommend.

Writing about organising events? Hold an event. At least for 100 people if the ticket is free, and for 30 people if it is paid. And try not to lose money. If it works, great, you have the full moral right to write about organising events. If it does not, okay, it is better to publish research or interview those who managed it.

After “going down into the subway” it becomes perfectly clear what to write about. You will not even need this scheme:

Life hack. One of the best ways to retain the customers of your product is to give them truly useful content in their field.

Just talk to your audience and find out what is important for them to know. Then run research, find public reports and put everything together into one thorough and beautiful guide.

If these are, for example, students of your online courses who need help finding a job and using the knowledge in practice, you can compile a guide answering their questions. In the guide give life hacks on how to choose a dream company, pass an interview and the probation period, with examples of tasks and the lessons that covered the material useful for completing them. Useful content for your audience will bring you higher loyalty and reputation.

To say your customers will be grateful is to say nothing. Customer gratitude → trust in your brand → repeat purchases.

13Duplicate the content, change the format

Nobody, nobody, nobody will mind hearing what you wrote. In a video, a webinar, a podcast, at a conference or anywhere.

Wrote a material? Great, now the audience of your blog and your friends on social networks can read you. But do you really want to miss the audience on YouTube and SoundCloud?

Just say what you wrote and increase your reach. Do not ignore formats other than articles. Let us extend the list a little:

• Instagram* and TikTok posts (regular, video, carousel)
• IGTV
• Streams, including on Twitch
• Pranks (why not? if a prank is shot on behalf of the brand and defends your key ideas, this content can turn out quite viral)
• Correctly outpacing competitors (argue and be constructive when talking about others’ work, and show your own examples)

Life hack no. 1: make sub-articles for your articles. For example, if you publish a selection like this one, you can republish several of its points somewhere else, linking to the main content.

Life hack no. 2: do not ignore books as a source of content marketing either. You would probably not know Maxim Ilyakhov, Maxim “Kombat” Batyrev and Fyodor Ovchinnikov of Dodo Pizza if it were not for their first books. There are many such publishers.

14Give to get

Such words can be heard at some esoteric session. But now it is serious.

Why not post the material not on your own resource but only on a third-party one? Calculate the average reach of the materials in your blog. Now the average reach somewhere else. To get the sum of both reaches, do this:

1. Choose a publisher (a resource that will publish your material on its side).
2. Give them your material.
3. Post the link to your material at the publisher in your blog.

The result is a win for you and for the publisher. You exchange each other’s audiences and increase the reach of the material. And if the publisher is a source respected in influential circles, you will look much better in the eyes of the potential audience.

More on this in the guide “2 simple ways to publish your brand’s articles or videos on third-party platforms”, which lists more than 35 Russian-language publishers and the rules for publishing with them.

Life hack no. 1: sometimes it is better not to give but to share. Find an authoritative person with many followers and offer to record a webinar or podcast with them. In return this person will publish the result on their side, and you get their audience. This is how it is usually done in the events sphere: specialists with large media reach are invited so that participants buy tickets for them.

Life hack no. 2: once you get a piece in an authoritative outlet, you can promote it through any tool, including buying traffic. This earns you both a lower bounce rate and more respect for the brand.

Here is an example: the agency MOAB bought a post from Artemy Lebedev and then promoted it through the “Announcements” service on VC.RU.

Another interesting example of cooperation is Coursera and Google. Google has its own Learning Center, but its courses are also available on Coursera. Such a partnership extends the boundaries of interaction with the potential consumer.

15What? Paid promotion of articles? Of course!

Who said that content marketing, lead generation and traffic buying are incompatible? Nothing could be simpler. Here are several ways:

• insert pop-up or static banners, a lead magnet, a newsletter or Telegram subscription right into the article and make it a selling one (as CarrotQuest does);
• add a Yandex, Google, Facebook* or VKontakte pixel to the article on your resource and catch with retargeting the readers who did not take the target action (as Roman Kumar Vias recommends);
• catch with retargeting those who did not watch the video to the end;
• show the article to your target audience as a stand-alone promotion method (maybe it will be better than a banner), and also before showing a selling banner (let them read first, and then buy).

16Update your materials (read this, it is not so obvious)

A good strategy: want the consumer to buy again? Release something new. First came the iPhone 3G. Then iPhone 4. Then iPhone 5. A little later, iPhone 5S.

You can do the same with materials: just update them and say so. Write next to the headline:

This post is constantly being added to. Bookmark it to keep all the new non-obvious tactics at hand, and subscribe to updates.

As a result, with the same material you hold the attention of a subscriber who is highly likely to recommend it to others. And if you post information about the next update, it brings an inflow of a new audience.

Conclusions

1. Spend your time on big → great articles.
2. Provoke and make some hype.
3. Turn to trends.
4. Choose the most converting headline.
5. Hold attention as in TV series: at the end of an episode (in your case, a paragraph) do something that makes people watch the next one.
6. Link new and old materials to each other.
7. Write for people, not for search robots.
8. Do not forget layout. The material must be both readable and scannable.
9. Do not ignore tools.
10. Remember that the presentation of a material is as important as the material itself. Package it for the audience.
11. Start with the strongest. The stronger the arguments used at the beginning, the more receptive the audience becomes.
12. Go down into the subway. Find yourself in the customer’s place, not in a thought experiment.
13. Say your articles on camera or into a microphone to create new content without extra effort.
14. Make friends with services and people who have an audience.
15. Connect performance.
16. Update your materials, but be sure to say so.

* Meta (the Facebook and Instagram products) is recognized as an extremist organization in the Russian Federation.

Article author: Ilya Sabirov, CEO and co-founder of Ed.Partners.

Ed.Partners is a marketing agency whose team has more than 5 years of EdTech experience. We have also started sharing our expertise in Telegram: t.me/ed_partners.